Commentary
Activating A Brand On Twitter
- by dave.b , Max Kalehoff , February 13, 2009
I think most people prefer to speak with humans, and that's especially true when it comes to interacting with companies. In fact, customers get frustrated when companies limit or dehumanize interaction, especially when product or customer service is involved.
That's probably why personal blogs authored by employees often resonate better than official corporate blogs. And why corporate blogs that include more human elements, including strong personal profiles, resonate more than ones with less.
All this makes me wonder about micro-blogging, specifically Twitter. I'm not going to debate whether your brand should be on Twitter. I'll just say that your brand should be where your customers are, and that often is on Twitter.
But what's the right way for a brand to activate itself on Twitter? Specifically, is it better for companies to actively engage on Twitter with a brand profile, or a human profile?
To be sure, some companies use their standalone brands for their Twitter username, the core element of a profile. Consider Southwest Arlines, or @southwestair, widely considered successful and useful to customers.
Other companies use a hybrid of brand and employee names. Consider Zappos, another success. Its main profile username is @zappos, but it clearly indicates in the bio and profile page that the author is Tony Hsieh, the company's CEO. There also are companies that have profiles that use hybrid usernames, incorporating employee names and the brand. Consider Lionel Menchaca at Dell, whose username is @LionelatDell.
There are also companies that activate on Twitter only via employees' personal profiles, either by design or accident. Consider AdWeek with its ubiquitous digital reporter, or http://twitter.com/bmorrissey @bmorrissey.
Which form is best? It depends on your objective and the relationship your customers have with your brand. Ultimately, you should use any social-media platform in whichever way works best for you. But marketers must consider that customers usually prefer interactions that are more human, not less. I found this out through my own experience on Twitter.
Here's my story: I've been on Twitter a few years and have remained an active user with my personal profile, @maxkalehoff . When I joined Clickable, my search-technology startup, I immediately claimed our company's profile and username on Twitter, @clickable. When we launched our product commercially in late 2008, I began using our company profile to alert customers and other stakeholders to company news, including new product features, service updates, and events, among other.
But I also started using our company Twitter profile to conduct customer service and business development interactions. Whenever I identified problems and opportunities through monitoring, or received inbound questions, I'd respond. And that's where I noticed the limit of a brand profile. Compared to my personal profile, interactions simply were not as engaging or rich. When I reverted to my personal profile to conduct Clickable business, I found receptivity to be far higher. This was especially apparent with Twitter members whom I'd never interacted with before.
As a result, I now maintain our company profile on Twitter, and use it primarily as an alert channel. But if I need to interact with customers or other stakeholders, I'll defer to my personal profile, which clearly indicates my company affiliation. At first, I was reluctant to mix my personal profile directly with work. But I eventually realized that maintaining two identities not only is increasingly difficult, but artificial. We are who we are and we have to bank on our own transparency and common sense.
While our strategy works for our startup, I acknowledge we'll need to adapt it as social platforms and our company mature. But however we grow, I'm committed to maintaining as much humanity and personality as possible. People prefer that, and we'd rather connect with our customers in a more meaningful way.
What form of Twitter profile works for you?
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Great post, Max. I already tweeted it! As I glance over the little mosaic of thumbnails of folks I am following, I inevitably click on the faces first, logos last.
Great post as usual Max. I exist on Twitter as a brand name, assuming people would figure out that it's me, the VP of marketing, from my profile or whatever if it mattered to them. But now I'm in a spot because it seems clear that logos have a negative appeal to many people; at the same time, you're correct in suggesting that we need to be where our customers are and for the most part, our customers AREN'T on Twitter, so maybe that's irrelevant too.
Certainly I use my Twitter account to make personal observations; but that's what I do with our brand too, PaydayPERX is a company that has opinions about things, whether they are directly related to us and our industry or whether they are totally unrelated. I don't get into political or religious debate (but I don't do that on my personal facebook either) - however issues like MySpace vs Facebook, the best trade shows to attend, iPhone vs Blackberry vs Palm vs Motorola Android Google, and lots more are fair game.
My long term strategy was to establish PaydayPERX with some kind of life of its own, and then pass it on to other employees to manage; however I am faced with the fact that only one other employee has a twitter account at all, and he has never to my knowledge posted anything to it. Eventually I hope to bring some folks to the front end, but it's tricky when I'm a relative midstream adopter in the grand scheme but single-atom-wide-bleeding-leading edge relative to the rest of the employee population.
In any event, as usual, you've put something else on my to-review list with your post.
@chriscbs: Great comment: "Any brands that I choose to follow I view as strictly one-way communication. I expect them to send me updates and information, but I would never expect to ask them a question and get an answer (as I would a "human"). Even though I'm sure there is someone behind the brand avatar, I don't expect to form a relationship with them." The essence of what I was trying to say.
Interesting post! I also find having dual twitter personalities to be challenging. I have had twitter.com/debdeb for quite some time as my personal Twitter account where I tweet about all kinds of things, some work-related. I recently created twitter.com/fusenews for alerts and news about the brand I am responsible for - FUSE . I thought it was important for fusenews to connected with the individual behind it - so I do include my personal twitter ID in my profile so that everyone know who is doing the tweeting. I think corporate twitters can get boring, so I also am somewhat personal in my tweets, i.e. so-and-so sent me this link. I also retweet occasionally myself and mentioned fusenews on my personal twitter account. I have found myself tweeting a lot less on my personal account about work-related topics because I am now covering those on fusenews. I thought people would not like to get repeats - but some people I know said "I don't follow you on fusenews because I thought it was all repeats and you would tweet it all on debdeb" so you need to be clear with your followers and in your profile what each profile is about. Fusenews is still relatively new (about a week or two old now) but it seems to picking up traction pretty well.
@BrookatPinger - very timely post.
We just discussed this topic with our marketing team THIS week. I've got two Twitter profiles and am not sure how I'd actually merge them, but I agree that personal is the way to go and people like interactions with PEOPLE.
Any suggestions on how to merge a split-personality-on-Twitter (1 personal, 1 work) - :) ???
Thanks for the commentary Max. I have two Twitter aliases. @joeciarallo is personal, and @prnewser is for my blog.
I find that @prnewser has grown much faster with little work, simply because it is "branded" and our readers want to get the official news feed via Twitter.
I'm the same way. I subsribe to the @mediapost feed to get the stories direct via Twitter but also follow certain writers as well.
Great post and very timely. I have tons of clients asking this exact same question. I 100% concur. You need a corporate presence, but the good stuff will always be person to person.
Thanks for this. Very helpful!
Max: We think alike, and I think you'd find CoTweet interesting. http://cotweet.com. It was designed for you. And here's our take on brands on Twitter. http://bit.ly/43SRuC
Michael Durwin: You raise some good points, but personal versus work profiles really depends on the individual and the company. To be sure, it's the elephant in the room: something most companies conveniently ignore.
As I said, I was reluctant to mix my personal profile directly with work. But I eventually realized that maintaining two identities not only is increasingly difficult, but artificial. We are who we are and we have to bank on our own transparency and common sense.
That's the challenge, all right. To be as interesting professionally as you are personally.
I love this post Max! And this is so true because I have two accounts on Twitter as well. One is my personal @ShannonNelson and one is for work @PierceMattiePR. But unlike Joe (hey Joe!), my followers have been in reverse. I have many more followers to my personal Twitter account than the Pierce Mattie one...however, I have found that it has helped me a great deal to gain followers faster to the Pierce Mattie account.
As you know because you follow my personal account, I tweet more about my life and interests there--I am myself and try to also be a good ambassador to show that those of us in PR (or in my case social media) are just regular folk. I can only hope that anything I say as "me" doesn't get blanketed as representative of the firm though. I think that is the biggest challenge by far.
This article was perfectly timed. I literally just created StyleSynch.com's Facebook page and was thinking about how to utilize my Twitter account, which I opened a couple weeks ago in anticipation of StyleSynch's official launch today.
After reading this great article and everyone's comments, I've decided to use just one account: personal=business. I figured that most people who know about StyleSynch right now are friends, friends of friends, colleagues and referrals, so why not make Twitter human/personal too? (The StyleSynch Facebook page is inextricably linked to my account as well.)
As the sole employee right now, this would also save me a lot of time having just one account. The next question is, what should I be tweeting about?
Great article and very appropriate answer. I struggled with the same situation a few months ago and ended up with the same solution. We are fairly new to twitter, but already using @brainjocks for the company "announcement" account and utilize @sbeckham to make friends and interact. Works awesome. As soon as we finish our new website and launch the blog, planning on retweeting everything the brand account says. We'll see how it works. Thanks Max!
This seems exactly right. There is a place for an "official" channel for news and the like, and there is the desire people have to connect with other people, to get "unofficial" help and opinions and conversation about brands or products they are interested in.
Offer both and let customers to decide for themselves what to follow and how to interact.
Max
Wonderful insight into the world of twitter, I also have 2 accounts, one personal (barely use, maybe once a day to bore people) and our company profile, though more experimental and fun, @dogs_of_hfm which follows the daily going on of the dogs at the office. I would think branding under the company makes the most sense, as stated by others above, the famous FedEx/Memphis twitter is a great example of out of control co-associated branding.
great insight. I already do something similar - and i'm glad to see that it has shown to work for others as well.
Good article and thought-provoking observations (by both author and commentators). I must say, however, that the preponderance of users who are in the 'Twitterverse' for the express purpose of marketing their businesses/their brands compromises the experience. You want to give these folks the benefit of the doubt, follow some Tweets and see what they have to say. It's like a conversation: You at least appear to be interested and engaged. But when it become abundantly clear that they're really only in it for themselves, it's tough to unfollow them. Again, like a conversation, it seems rude to simply turn around and unceremoniously walk away.
Is it just me? Am I too sensitive? Overthinking it?
@peterleeds: The good thing about Twitter (and most channels, really) is that you have the option to avoid or ignore. Marketing one's business can be of extremely high value for a shopper seeking potential benefits that said business may offer. For example, if I identify someone openly asking the community for recommendations on easy-to-use search management software, I can offer value by suggesting they speak with one of our customers as well as sign up for our free trial. I can also offer value by spotting dissatisfied customers and helping them out. Communities only become polluted (the side effect I think you're describing) when signals and interactions become disingenuous or irrelevant.